Editorial: The challenge of the Dancing Girl

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has just had its hands scalded trying to censor the iconic image of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro. In its new arts textbook titled Madhurima for Class 9 students, the agency digitally altered a photograph of the beautiful bronze figurine to cover up its nudity and ended up making it look like the girl was wearing a formless upper garment, which is both historically inaccurate and a corruption of its aesthetic.  If this is NCERT’s idea of introducing art to schoolchildren, it was not only ridiculous but also sneaky for trying to guide them towards a crypto-Victorian sensibility in the guise of being age-appropriate.

An outcry from historians has forced NCERT to reverse its decision but only in digital editions of the textbook. The incident betrays a bitter truth about state agencies working to further a pseudo-nationalist agenda in today’s India: It’s not pride they have in our 4,500-year-old heritage of art, it’s embarrassment they feel.The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro is a remarkably small statuette currently showcased in the Indus Valley Civilisation gallery of the National Museum in New Delhi.

Among the thousands of artefacts housed there, it stands out for its bold and challenging pose and for the advanced metallurgy our forebears were capable of. The image has illuminated every textbook of history since Independence without ever attracting “age-appropriate” attention. That NCERT felt the need to cover it up now illustrates the utter hypocrisy of policing an ancient object of art for sexualisation while letting the male gaze rule our contemporary cinema.This is not the first time that the Dancing Girl has troubled the sensibilities of state agencies.

In 2023, she was used as the ‘mascot’ for the International Museum Expo organised by the Union Ministry of Culture. A life-size statue was made of her, but wearing a garish pink costume covering her body. It was more reminiscent of Bollywood’s imagination of “tribal women” than Harappan art.

This warped sensibility towards a signature icon of our civilisation is something we have inherited from the British, in fact, to which we have added our own native prudery. When the archaeologist John Marshall unearthed the statuette in Mohenjo-Daro in 1926, he described it, on the basis of zero evidence, as a “young aboriginal nautch girl, her hand on hip in half-impudent posture”.

Since then, that colonial-cum-conservative morality has regularly expressed itself in Indian leaders’ approach to art depicting women. Famously, India’s leading freedom fighters are said to have had reservations about the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and Konark and had to be administered wiser counsel by Rabindranath Tagore. 

The famous Mauryan-era sculpture of the Didarganj Yakshi has always made governments squeamish. State-curated photographs and promotional literature are deliberately sanitised to downplay the anatomy, and interpretations of it favour the Mother Goddess angle rather than a secular view.There may, however, be more than prudery behind this habitual misrepresentation of the depiction of strident womanhood in our art. In 1911, in pre-Independent India, imagery of the goddess Durga showing her carrying weapons in her eight arms was banned on matchboxes because it was used as a device to fuel resistance in Bengal.

Seen in that light, the problem for state agencies may not be the anatomy of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro but “her hand on hip in half-impudent posture.”